A Year of Wrongful Imprisonment Is Worth $200,000 in D.C. and Nothing in Wyoming

Ronnie Long spent 44 years in prison in North Carolina for a rape he did not commit.▸ He was released in 2021; four months later the governor pardoned him on grounds of innocence. That pardon opened the door to North Carolina's compensation statute, which pays $50,000 per year of wrongful incarceration — up to a cap of $750,000. Forty-four years at that rate would be $2.2 million; Long received the state's maximum, $750,000, according to Duke Law's Wilson Center for Science and Justice. He only came close to being made whole because he separately sued the city in federal court, a case that settled for $22 million in 2024. Most exonerees never get that second chance. Whether they get anything at all is mostly a function of geography.

The National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and UC Irvine's Newkirk Center, logged 97 exonerations that occurred in 2025 — the lowest annual count it has recorded since 2013.▸ Fewer cases didn't mean less time lost: those 97 people served a combined 1,373 years before they were cleared, an average of 14.2 years each. Thirty-six of them lost more than 20 years; of those, 13 lost more than 30; of those, three lost more than 40. Official misconduct — withheld evidence, witness tampering, perjury by a police officer or prosecutor — was present in 72% of 2025's exonerations.

The Registry's running total is its own kind of ledger: including 2025, it has now recorded 3,792 exonerations since 1989, and total payments to exonerees over that period — state compensation plus civil damage awards combined — now exceed $5.5 billion.▸ That figure sounds large until it's divided by the people and years it's meant to cover, and by how unevenly it lands.

There is no national standard.▸ A federal statute, last updated in 2004, pays $50,000 for every year of wrongful federal imprisonment and $100,000 for every year on death row. States are free to pay more, less, or nothing, and Duke Law's Wilson Center found they do all three. Washington, D.C. pays $200,000 per year, the country's highest flat rate. Texas pays $80,000 per year plus a lifetime annuity, tuition credit, and job training — the state rebuilt its statute after Timothy Cole, wrongfully convicted of rape, died in prison in 1999, ten years before he was cleared; his family received $1,060,000 posthumously under the law that now bears his name. At the other end, Wisconsin's statute — written in 1913 and last adjusted in 1987 — pays $5,000 per year of wrongful imprisonment, capped at $25,000 total, no matter how long someone served. And in eleven states — among them Wyoming, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, and New Mexico — there is no compensation statute at all. An exoneree walks out with nothing from the state unless they can win a separate civil lawsuit, which requires proving the specific officials who convicted them acted with something like malice, not just error.

Civil litigation is the reason Ronnie Long's total didn't stop at $750,000 — but Duke's researchers note that of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA evidence nationally, only 60% received any compensation at all, and half of those recovered it only by winning in federal court, a route that requires finding a lawyer willing to front a multi-year case against a government defendant and proving misconduct, not just innocence.▸ Thirty-nine states, D.C., and the federal government now have statutes precisely because that route is so unreliable — model legislation pushed by the Innocence Project and the American Bar Association turned "sue and hope" into something closer to a right. But of the eleven states still without a statute, several have let bills die in committee more than once; Georgia's most recent attempt failed to get the governor's signature in 2023, and its only backstop is a state claims board that Duke's researchers found "has never awarded compensation to an exoneree."

Compensation figures reflect the statutes and rates on the books as of December 2024 per Duke Law's Wilson Center; several states (Idaho, Oregon, Delaware) have raised their rates in recent years and more legislation is pending, so year-of-passage matters when comparing amounts across states.